Category Weather

Autumn walks rarely give you a reason to stop. A hot drink buys you ten minutes at the best view on the loop. What I want from an insulated bottle when the wind comes over the hedge.

I used to open the weather app looking for permission. It gave me a reason to stay home most weeks, and most of those reasons turned out to be wrong. Now I only ask it what to put on and which roads will hold.

Fog turns a road I have walked hundreds of times into somewhere I have never been. It is also the one condition where being seen matters more than seeing, and the morning I missed my own gate taught me that the hard way.

Rain I plan for. Cold I plan for. Wind I keep walking straight into like it is going to be fine, and about twice a year it reminds me that open farm ground has no shelter in it at all.

For years I let a rain icon on a screen cancel my week. Then I got caught out in a steady soaker and had one of the best walks of that spring. Rain is not the problem. Cold, wind, and lightning are the problems.

Mud is not one thing. Some of it walks fine and some of it will take a boot off your foot and keep it. After a lot of ruined afternoons I can name five kinds by sight, and I test for the rest with a stick.

A hard freeze is the only weather I know of that makes a farm road better instead of worse. It is also on a timer. Here is how I read a frost morning, how I plan around the thaw, and the two freezes I skip.